We are boss.

One of our daily goals for Toast is to seek out and surround ourselves with inspiration from other women, creatives, and entrepreneurs. Through this, we stumbled across the Being Boss podcast, run by Emily Thompson and Kathleen Shannon (a fellow Okie!) and targeted for creative entrepreneurs. This is now one of our favorite sources for advice and conversation, and this week, Emily and Kathleen challenged their followers to talk about what it means to Be Boss. So, here we go.

We have never lost motivation for our company, and we remain inspired every day. There are three main reasons for this, and they align with our mission as a company.

We do what we enjoy: design.

We help other people start their companies, just like we started ours.

We grow the community in Oklahoma by helping our city's new businesses flourish.

Toast's primary mission is to celebrate people coming together in support of a common vision. When we started this company, we knew that relationships were the most important thing to us, and that Toast would be built on reputation and recommendations.

Toast’s primary mission is to celebrate people coming together in support of a common vision. 

When you boil it down, the focus of our business is helping people with their businesses. We work with clients when they have an idea and help them bring it to life. Frequently, our clients are young entrepreneurs, so we are one of their first big steps. Their commitment to their companies, reflected in their decision to hire us for their branding, website, and design needs, represents a leap of faith, an investment in their businesses. In this way, we consider it a crucial part of our job to help our clients Be Boss.

We consider it a crucial part of our job to help our clients Be Boss.

When we decided on our company values, we realized that in addition to helping grow the local community, it was equally important that we give back to that community. We were both born and raised in Oklahoma, and we wouldn't be where we are without this place and these people. Each day, we ask what we as individuals and as a business can do to make a difference. Sometimes this is very small, like buying coffee for the person in the drive through behind us or using our platform and followers to help promote other local businesses, but other times it is a larger conversation. How can we incorporate pro-bono work into our schedule to support the causes we believe in most? How can we manage our business financials to ensure that a portion of our profits goes back to our community in some way? How can we help each person we encounter, whether they become our clients or not?

These are not always easy questions to answer, but they are questions that we ask frequently and that we are constantly refining our answers to, and I think that's one of the greatest responsibilities of Being Boss. As Uncle Ben said, "With great power comes great responsibility," and although saying we have "great power" may be stretching it more than a little bit for us, we do believe in the great responsibility, and we consider that our responsibility regardless of how far Toast ever reaches.

When we decided on our company values, we realized that in addition to helping grow the local community, it was equally important that we give back to that community.

More than anything else (balancing financials, setting our own schedules, designing something awesome), these two themes represent our commitment to Being Boss. We're still very young – approaching our second year as an official business, and closing out our first year with an established identity – but we’re more excited every day for the future and all that it holds.